“As I pointed out back in July of 2015, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (“I”-VT) is not the independent left politician many progressives claim he is. He’s a Democratic Party company man.

That has been clear from his long Congressional record of voting with the neoliberal, dollar-drenched Democrats and accepting their seniority-based committee assignments. It was clear when he came out to Iowa City in December of 2014 to give a speech so focused on the terrible Republicans that a professor had to remind him that corporate and imperial Democrats are a problem too. It was clear when he decided to the run for the U.S. presidency as a Democrat and promised to back the Democrats’ eventual nominee (Hillary Clinton).

It was manifest when he instructed his followers to line up behind the corrupt, two-faced, miserable, and arch-corporatist war hawk Hillary and her atrociously dull center-right running mate in the general election.

It is clear from Bernie’s recent agreement to go on an eight-state “unity tour” with Clinton Democrat Tom Perez, who defeated Sanders’ “progressive Democrat” ally Keith Ellison in the election for chairmanship of the DNC.

And it is unmistakable with his participation in the Democrats’ noxious and dysfunctional attempt to paint out Donald Trump as a tool and/or ally of Russia.

Russiagate is, among things, a false-flag fabrication designed to help the DNC and the Democratic Party elite avoid responsibility for blowing the election. The “dismal Dems” (Doug Henwood’s phrase) went with a wooden, Wall Street-captive, and (sorry) crooked candidate who couldn’t mobilize enough working- and lower-class and minority voters to defeat the hyper-poisonous and widely hated Trumpenstein. And they fixed the intraparty game to ensure the defeat of Sanders, who would have bested Herr Donald. (Sanders would certainly have mobilized enough working class and rural voters to prevail. All the match-up polls during the primary season had Sanders trouncing Trump one-on-one and doing far better than Hillary against the Clockwork Orangatun. Even I, one of candidate Sanders’ earliest and most insistent online radical left critics, would have had to vote for Bernie over Trump).

The “Moscow Stole It” narrative is a fancy version of “My Dog Ate My Homework” for a Democratic Party that abandoned the working class and the causes of peace, social justice, and environmental sustainability decades ago. The “inauthentic opposition” party (as the late Sheldon Wolin rightly described the Democrats of the neoliberal age) would rather not take a long, hard, and honest look at what it has become. It does not want to concede anything to those who dream of turning it into an authentically progressive organization.

The “Russia Did It” charge works on both scores. It has therefore proven irresistible to establishment Democrats determined to stave off demands from leftish-progressive-populist types in their own party.

According to the leading U.S. social-democrat and Bernie backer Bhaskar Sunkara last January, “There were positive steps [during the 2016 presidential campaign] in the direction of addressing the need for a class-based, populist approach, even if it meant alienating some of the business interests in the Democratic tent in the wake of the November defeat. Among a lot of Democrats,” Sunkara told The Washington Post last January, “it seems like that conversation has been halted. I blame the focus on Russia, largely.”

To make matters worse from a progressive perspective, Russiagate is a losing strategy, even a “conspiracy trap” (Masha Gessen) for progressives. since there’s no real smoking-gun proof and few voters can or will follow the bouncing ball of complex allegations and counters. It directs public attention onto something Trump isn’t, a Kremlin tool, rather than what he really is: an arch-plutocratic pre-fascist racist, sexist, and nativist and a super-militarist enemy of the poor and working-class majority. It’s given Trump a free pass on numerous policies and actions over which a remotely genuine opposition party would be crucifying him

It has already (as I predicted here exactly two weeks ago) helped egg the Orange Tinted Beast into a reckless military action conducted in part to prove that he is not a Russian puppet or ally – the launch of 59 Tomahawk missiles into Syria.

If it were to succeed in unseating Trump, moreover, it would set a dangerous new precedent of potent “intelligence community” (CIA) interference in domestic U.S. politics at the highest level.

You’d think all this Russia madness would have really pissed off Bernie Sanders, official leader of the nation’s progressive Democrats. You might think that Bernie would have called bullshit on the establishment Dems’ whole preposterous Bear Ate Our Homework narrative. You might fancy him saying something like this: “Look, it’s not like Gucifer, WikiKeaks, and the Kremlin or whoever made it up that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC rigged the primary election against me. That really happened – and if it hadn’t, my fellow Americans, Donald Trump would not be your president today!”

You might imagine that Bernie would have used his big barrel-chested Brooklyn truck driver’s voice to denounce a failed xenophobic and neo-McCarthyite conspiracy ploy that distracts attention both from Trump’s real threats evils and from the Democrats’ responsibility for putting a dangerously unhinged right-wing uber-narcissist in the White House. You might picture him denouncing the “deep state” “intelligence community’s” meddling in U.S. politics.

You might visualize the anti-plutocratic Senator mockingly asking, “just what great American democratic process is it that was supposedly subverted by the Russians?!” Even mainstream liberal political scientists like Marin Gilens and Benjamin Page have demonstrated and acknowledged that the U.S is now essentially a corporate-financial oligarchy in which the working-class majority’s policy preferences are largely irrelevant regardless of which party or what party configuration holds sway in Washington.

Dream on. None of this has happened because Bernie Sanders continues to insult the Eugene Debs poster that sits in his office by being a Democratic Party company man. And that has meant playing along obediently with Russiagate.

At a CNN town hall last January 10th, Sanders unaccountably proclaimed that “the evidence is overwhelming” that Russia interfered “to help elect the candidate of their choice, Mr. Trump” and “to undermine in a significant way American democracy.”

In a YouTube video last February, Bernie pronounced that “the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russia played an active role in the 2016 election with the goals of electing Donald Trump has president…the Trump campaign had repeated contacts with the senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.” Sanders worried about a “dossier” showing that Russian agents had damaging evidence on Trump’s private life – evidence he said the Kremlin could use to “blackmail” the White House. So, what if it’s all pretty much trumped-up speculation fed by shady “deep state” suggestion and innuendo?

Sanders has at the very least fellow-travelled along with the dollar-drenched, demobilizing, and dullard Democrats depressing descent into CIA-serving conspiratorialism regarding the Kremlin’s allegedly relevant interference in our supposedly democratic political process.

Along the way, Bernie has recently played along with Trump’s dog-wagging pretext for illegally chucking 59 Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian air base. He has joined in the establishment chorus of reflexive support for the highly questionable claim that Syria chemical-bombed innocent civilians.

Recently I asked my “social media” correspondents if any among them had been following Sanders’ positions and statements on Russiagate. Was I correct in suspecting that he’d been pretty much following the party line? One journalist wrote to say “I don’t think so.. when this was all blowing up a few weeks ago, instead of talking about Russiagate, he was marching with Nissan workers in Mississippi and said such struggles are the most vital right now. Also, he criticized more Democrats for not showing up.” The journalist sent me a link to an interview in which Sanders explained why he went to Dixie to help workers fight for a union. Sanders said the following:

“What matters most to the people is whether or not they’re going to have a decent standard of living; whether they can feed their kids; send their kids to college; have childcare; get some time off. And that’s what this struggle is about. It’s what workers here at the Nissan plant in Canton, Mississippi are going to have dignity; are going to have decent wages and decent benefits. It’s very basic and at a time when the middle class of this country is shrinking, when so many people in my state, here, all over the world, all over this country are working longer hours for low wages. This is a fight that has to be engaged and has to be won.”

When the interviewer asked Sanders whether the fight for economic justice “is a big enough priority right now for the Democratic Party as a whole?” Sanders said this: “what priority is more important than making sure that we expand the middle class, that people have decent wages, decent benefits, and decent healthcare? The Democratic Party has got to be in the middle of this struggle in Mississippi, in Vermont and all over this country.”

It’s good that Sanders went to support auto workers in the Deep South. It’s admirable that he called for decent wages and benefits for workers across the country. It’s true that Sanders is a New Deal pro-labor and anti-poverty pro-single payer and anti-plutocratic progressive Democrat.

But so was my grandfather in the middle 1960s, when he participated in the federal War on Poverty program in Harlan County while arguing Lyndon Johnson’s mass-murderous side for the U.S. war on Southeast Asia in debates with antiwar radicals at the University of Kentucky. What my grandfather and countless other Great Society liberals didn’t understand was something Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to warn them about on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before King’s assassination (or execution): the U.S. desperately needed to slash its giant and murderous military system and drop its attachment to global empire if it wanted to be fiscally and morally situated to solve its vast domestic social and political problems.

Sanders may have opposed the Vietnam War and the U.S. proxy wars in Central America (good for him) during his young adulthood and middle age, but during the post-Cold War years, “Bernie and the [F-35] Jets” Sanders fell badly into the Empire trap that King tried to advise liberals against.

It’s a little tough to take Sanders’ outrage against Bashar al-Assad’s war criminality (real and alleged) all that seriously given candidate Bernie’s support for Barack Obama’s drone war program, rightly described by Noam Chomsky as “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times.” And that kind of moral and policy hypocrisy is no small part of why many of us on the actual (“radical” and “hard”) U.S. left refused to do principle-trashing cartwheels for Bernie’s presidential candidacy.

And notice what Sanders did NOT say in that interview. He did not say, “no, economic justice is not a big enough priority for the Democratic Party right now.” He certainly did not say anything about how the Russia madness has helped keep dismal dollar Dems mired in the neoliberal nothingness that explains much of how the Republicans’ absurd control of all three branches of the federal government and most of the state governments in a nation whose populace hates the Republican Party.

Bernie Sanders is a major party company man.

A recent essay sent to me bears the title “Is Bernie Sanders Distancing himself from ‘Russiagate’?” The author answers in the affirmative because the Senator recently said the following at a rally in Boston:

“Some people think the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks. I don’t agree, because I’ve been there…..Let me tell you something else some of you might not agree with. It wasn’t that Donald Trump won the election, it was that the Democratic party lost the election…We need a Democratic party that is not a party of the liberal elite but of the working class of this country, we need a party that is a grassroots party, where candidates are talking to working people not spending their time raising money for the wealthy and the powerful. And when we do that, when we transform the Democratic party, we transform America.”

The author says that “Sanders’s comments appear to distance him from the Democratic Party’s current orthodoxy: that Hillary Clinton lost the election because of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

The critical word there is “appear.” It’s good that Sanders wants to see the emergence of a real opposition party that is “not a party of the liberal elite but of the working class of this country, …a grassroots party.” It’s super that Sanders criticized the Clinton’s campaign’s noxious neoliberal and identity-politicized shaming of the nation’s white working class and rural majority. He’s right to note that the dismal dollar Dems lost the election more than the radical reactionary Republicans won it.

But no, Sanders’ comments in Boston contain no explicit distancing from, or criticism of, Russiagate or of the warmongering, Pentagon-feeding imperial doctrine that informs the neo-McCarthyite anti-Russia rhetoric of the nation’s foreign policy establishment. Sanders’ speech gives no indication that he will break radically from the Pentagon system and the U.S. global Empire to seriously confront poverty and inequality at home and abroad. Sanders gave no reason why we should believe against all historical evidence that the Democratic Party is a fit vehicle for the transformation – the “political revolution” (can we have a social one too Bernie?) – he claims to seek. And if “the hot air factory from Vermont” (as Alexander Cockburn once called Sanders) is so critical of the Russia-blaming Democratic Party these days, why is he about to go on a big “unity” soiree with DNC chair Perez, who comes from the party’s reigning, Russia-obsessed LNW wing?”

Excerpt “January 29, 5-year-old Sinan al Ameri was asleep with his mother, his aunt, and 12 other children in a one-room stone hut typical of poor rural villages in the highlands of Yemen. A little after 1 a.m., the women and children awoke to the sound of a gunfight erupting a few hundred feet away. Roughly 30 members of Navy SEAL Team 6 were storming the eastern hillside of the remote settlement.

According to residents of the village of al Ghayil, in Yemen’s al Bayda province, the first to die in the assault was 13-year-old Nasser al Dhahab. The house of his uncle, Sheikh Abdulraouf al Dhahab, and the building behind it, the home of 65-year-old Abdallah al Ameri and his son Mohammed al Ameri, 38, appeared to be the targets of the U.S. forces, who called in air support as they were pinned down in a nearly hourlong firefight.

With the SEALs taking heavy fire on the lower slopes, attack helicopters swept over the hillside hamlet above. In what seemed to be blind panic, the gunships bombarded the entire village, striking more than a dozen buildings, razing stone dwellings where families slept, and wiping out more than 120 goats, sheep, and donkeys.

Three projectiles tore through the straw and timber roof of the home where Sinan slept. Cowering in a corner, Sinan’s mother, 30-year-old Fatim Saleh Mohsen, decided to flee the bombardment. Grabbing her 18-month-old son and ushering her terrified children into the narrow outdoor passageway between the tightly packed dwellings, she headed into the open. Over a week later, Sinan’s aunt Nadr al Ameri wept as she stood in the same room and recalled watching her sister run out the door into the darkness.

Nesma al Ameri, an elderly village matriarch who lost four family members in the raid, described how the attack helicopters began firing down on anything that moved. As she recounted the horror of what happened, Sinan tapped her on the arm. “No, no. The bullets were coming from behind,” the 5-year-old insisted, interrupting to demonstrate how he was shot at and his mother gunned down as they ran for their lives. “From here to here,” Sinan said, putting two fingers to the back of his head and drawing an invisible line to illustrate the direction of the bullet exiting her forehead. His mother fell to the ground next to him, still clutching his baby brother in her arms. Sinan kept running.

His mother’s body was found in the early light of dawn, the front of her head split open. The baby was wounded but alive. Sinan’s mother was one of at least six women killed in the raid, the first counterterrorism operation of the Trump administration, which also left 10 children under the age of 13 dead. “She was hit by the plane. The American plane,” explained Sinan. “She’s in heaven now,” he added with a shy smile, seemingly unaware of the enormity of what he had witnessed or, as yet, the impact of his loss. “Dog Trump,” declared Nesma, turning to the other women in the room for agreement. “Yes, the dog Trump,” they agreed.

According to White House press secretary Sean Spicer, the al Ghayil raid “was a very, very well thought out and executed effort,” planning for which began under the Obama administration back in November 2016. Although Ned Price, former National Security Council spokesperson, and Colin Kahl, the national security adviser under Vice President Biden, challenged Spicer’s account, what is agreed upon is that Trump gave the final green light over dinner at the White House on January 25. According to two people with direct knowledge, the White House did not notify the U.S. ambassador to Yemen in advance of the operation.”

A systemic crisis in the global Deep System has driven the violent radicalization of a Deep State faction

“President Donald Trump is not fighting a war on the establishment: he’s fighting a war to protect the establishment from itself, and the rest of us.

At first glance, this isn’t obvious. Among his first actions upon taking office, Trump vetoed the Trans Pacific Partnership, the controversial free trade agreement which critics rightly said would lead to US job losses while giving transnational corporations massive power over national state policies on health, education and other issues.

Trump further plans to ditch the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and US, which would have diluted key state regulations on the activities of transnational corporates on issues like food safety, the environment and banking; and to renegotiate NAFTA, potentially heightening tensions with Canada.

Trump appears to be in conflict with the bulk of the US intelligence community, and is actively seeking to restructure the government to minimize checks and balances, and thus consolidate his executive power.

His White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has restructured the National Security Council, granting himself and Trump’s Chief of Staff Richard ‘Reince’ Priebus permanent seats on the NSC’s Principals’ Committee – opening the door to the White House politicization of the government’s highest national security body.

Trump’s White House has purged almost the entire senior staff of the State Department, and tested the loyalty of the Department of Homeland Security with its new ‘Muslim ban’ order.

So what is going on? One approach to framing the Trump movement comes from Jordan Greenhall, who sees it as a conservative (“Red Religion”) Insurgency against the liberal (“Blue Church”) Globalist establishment (the “Deep State”). Greenhall suggests, essentially, that Trump is leading a nationalist coup against corporate neoliberal globalization using new tactics of “collective intelligence” by which to outsmart and outspeed his liberal establishment opponents.

But at best this is an extremely partial picture.

In reality, Trump has ushered in something far more dangerous:

The Trump regime is not operating outside the Deep State, but mobilizing elements within it to dominate and strengthen it for a new mission.

The Trump regime is not acting to overturn the establishment, but to consolidate it against a perceived crisis of a wider transnational Deep System.

The Trump regime is not a conservative insurgency against the liberal establishment, but an act of ideologically constructing the current crisis as a conservative-liberal battleground, led by a particularly radicalized white nationalist faction of a global elite.

The act is a direct product of a global systemic crisis, but is a short-sighted and ill-conceived reaction, pre-occupied with surface symptoms of that crisis. Unfortunately, those hoping to resist the Trump reaction also fail to understand the system dynamics of the crisis.

All this can only be understood when we look at the big picture. That means the following: we must look a little more closely at the individuals inside Trump’s administration, the wider social and institutional networks they represent, and what emerges from their being interlocked in government; we must contextualize this against two factors, the escalation of global systemic crisis, and the Trump regime’s ideological framing(s) of that crisis (both for themselves, and for public consumption); we must connect this with the impact on the transnational Deep System, and how that links up with the US Deep State; and we must then explore what this all means in terms of the scope of actions likely to be deployed by the Trump regime to pursue its discernable goals.

This investigation will help to establish a ground state for anyone on which to build a meaningful strategy of response that accounts for the full systemic complexity of our Trumpian moment.”

“Trump’s Muslim ban is real and even more draconian than many anticipated. Visa holders, dual nationals, and even green card holders from Muslim-majority countries may be barred indefinitely from the United States. Based on our analysis of the Executive Order language that is circulating, nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Yemen who are outside of the U.S. with a valid U.S. visa will not be able to enter the United States. The order is written in such a broad manner that it may also prohibit dual nationals of those countries who are citizens of non-targeted countries from entering the U.S. on a visa. Perhaps most alarmingly, it can be interpreted to bar even U.S. permanent residents who are outside of the United States from re-entering.

“We in the Iranian-American community are already feeling the effects of this proposed actions. Plans for family to visit, for loved ones to return home, for family friends to join us to study in U.S. schools, are now in jeopardy. There is a palpable feeling of being torn apart from our friends and loved ones. Just a year ago, we were full of hope that the American people and the Iranian people were heading down a new road of engagement thanks to the nuclear deal. Now we are not even sure if parents will be able to attend weddings in the U.S. or if we need to put travel plans abroad on hold for fear of being blocked from coming back.

“NIAC Action calls on the Trump Administration to reconsider this dangerous course of action and for lawmakers to publicly oppose this plan before Trump’s finalization of the order, which is expected tomorrow. Further, any nominations to key national security or civil rights-related posts, including Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson and Attorney General nominee Jeff Sessions, should be put on hold until these actions can be fully evaluated and nominees address the public’s concerns.

“The list of countries targeted under the Executive Order is based on a discriminatory visa waiver bill (H.R.158) passed in 2015 shortly after then-candidate Trump called for a Muslim ban. We warned then of a slippery slope and are now on the way to a much darker vision of America than many of us could have imagined.

“The ban will initially last for 30 days but it is likely that for some countries it will be permanent. The document says that, after the 30 day suspension of entry, the Department of State and Homeland Security will present a report of countries that do not provide enough information to the U.S. to ensure visa applicants from that country are not a threat. Those countries will be given 60 days to address those issues and comply with U.S. requirements. If they do not, a Presidential proclamation will be issued to ban all entrants from that country.

“For Iran, mindful of the tensions between U.S. and Iranian governments we are skeptical that Iran would comply with such requirements or that, if it did comply, the Trump Administration would accept such efforts. This would, in effect, mean a permanent ban on entry for Iranians.”

“So….if President Assad’s intention were to “bomb his own people”, how does it make sense that those “people” left liberated East Aleppo for the government held West Aleppo and then returned to the homes that President Assad wanted to bomb and yet are living there safely, without being bombed and with the help and support of the Syrian state?

If the intention were to destroy his own infrastructure, why rebuild it as soon as its retaken from the “rebels” aka Nusra Front-led terrorists?

At the same time, the corporate media defends the “rebels” who were starving, executing and torturing the civilians that they claim to be “protecting”. Funny also how, now, East Aleppo is safe for journalists, now their “rebels” have left. How many journalists dared to enter the so called “rebel” enclaves during the occupation of East Aleppo, unless of course they had an SAA escort for protection…the same SAA they then vilified and accused of murdering their own families.

Yet the corporate media and leftist NGOs and faux anti war shills, still claim the “rebels” aka non Syrian terrorist organisations are being persecuted and need saving with marches and convoys.

Why did the corporate media, the leftist NGOs and faux anti war shills effectively maintain the imprisonment of 110,000 Syrian civilians in East Aleppo? Why did they not work for the liberation of these people from their incarceration under a brutal Nusra Front regime?

Why are these groups still failing to mention the 11,000 civilians murdered in West Aleppo by the Nusra Front regime in East Aleppo, over the last almost five years?

Perhaps because their narrative was supplied by those affiliated with the Nusra Front regime?

They also maintain the #WhiteHelmet myths despite the multiple testimonies from Syrian civilians describing them as nothing more than terrorist operatives, supporting Al Qaeda.

Do people not see the sheer insanity of this narrative? Twisted, perverted does not even cover it.” Vanessa Beeley (independent journalist)

“FACTS you need to know about Syria
• The Assad family belongs to the tolerant Islam of Alawid orientation.
• Syrian women have the same rights as men to study, health and education.
• Syria women are not forced to wear the burqa. The Sharia (Islamic law) is unconstitutional.
• Syria is the only Arab country with a secular constitution and does not tolerate Islamic extremist movements.
• Roughly 10% of the Syrian population belongs to one of the many Christian denominations, all fully integrated in Syrian political and social life.
• In other Arab countries the Christian population is less than 1% due to sustained hostility.
• Syria has banned genetically modified (GMO) seeds, stating his decision was made in order “to preserve human health,”
• Syria has an opening to Western society and culture like no other Arab country.
• Its media and universities openly debate the global power elite’s influence in things. This means that they fully grasp the fact that real power in the West lies not in the White House but rather with the complex and powerful grid of elite think-tanks and central banks.
• Throughout history there have been five popes of Syrian origin. Religious tolerance is unique in the area.
• Prior to the current civil war, Syria was one of the only peaceful countries in the area, having avoided major wars or internal conflicts.
• Syria was the only country that admitted Iraqi refugees without any social, political or religious discrimination
• Syria clearly and unequivocally opposes Zionism and the Israel government.
• Following a massive oil find in Syria’s Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967, Netanyahu recently asked Obama to recognize its annexation of the territory. To consolidate its hold, plans are afoot to quadruple Israeli settler numbers to 100,000.
And the most two important points:
• Syria is one of the only countries in the Middle East without debts to the International Monetary Fund ( Pre-invasion Libya & Iran the only others )
• Syria is the only Mediterranean country which remains the owner of its oil company, with an oil reserve of 2,500 million barrels, the operation of which has avoided privatization and is reserved exclusively for state-owned enterprises.
So now ask yourself, why are we truly attempting to overthrow yet another government? What are we hoping to fix here?
If the recent invasions and illegal assassinations of Presidents like Qaddafi and Saddam have taught us anything, it should be the understanding of the blowback effect of such lawless actions by the West and the vacuum of chaos that always supersedes it.
Debt Conquer. Invent a reason to invade and destroy, then offer $Trillions in IMF funding to rebuild… conveniently paid back by control of your oil fields and the free access to build gas pipelines to the west. ” Raymond Westlake via David Alpert via Luciana Bohne via Sherri Ingrey